Update Your Sig: 3DMark Launches New Direct X12 Test

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The most essential item for PC gaming is not a mouse, nor a keyboard, nor even a PC. Without a sweet forum signature proudly declaring your 3DMark [official site] scores, you may as well give up and play Monopoly. I’m sure you’ll be both overjoyed and anxious to hear that 3DMark devs Futuremark have expanded the graphics benchmark with a new test stressing DirectX 12 performance. How powerful is your PC – your box, your rig, your beast, your beefy big boy, your cyberhog, your chip-slapped datajack, your silicon-snorting framecrusher – and has anyone noticed your sig still lists old scores?

The new DX12 test is Time Spy, a swish scene which is a bit like if that magical time-travelling lens in Dishonored 2 showed you a load of old 3DMark tests then you accidentally broke your nan’s plastic chandelier lamp. It’s strange seeing those scenes as incidental dioramas in a museum rather than the computer-crushing spectacles they once were. Here’s the test in handy YouTube video form:

“With its pure DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, 3DMark Time Spy is the ideal benchmark for testing the DirectX 12 performance of the latest graphics cards,” Futuremark say. Good. Yes. Certainly. Why not.

If you want a go yourself, Time Spy is now live in 3DMark. You can download the demo through Steam or from Futuremark. If you want to get serious about benchmarks, the paid upgrades with more options are on sale at the moment.

If that test falls roughly into line with previous 3Dmark tests (ie, they overkill a fair bit, a 30fps 3dmark test of that gen generally guarantees 60fps for release games of that time-frame) I’m pretty set for the next year at least, even with a positively ancient CPU (An AMD FX one at that)